No rats, plenty of at-bats.

The troop surge produced no kills on day one, but I've sent them back out for round two!

So today was day two of the tournament and it was single elimination. While the temperature got up to 48 or so on Saturday during our two games, it was 38 on the way out to the fields Sunday morning and 42 when we finished, three games and eight hours later. The entire day was cloud filled and even a bit drizzly in the morning. It made the day exhausting, regardless of how many games we played. You spend most of the time just trying to stay warm and loose.

A little back ground on the team, last season we played what is called E ball, or the lowest level which run from A to E. This year we've been moved to D level in all three of the organizations in which we're playing. In this particular tournament, a bunch of D teams were playing which have probably beaten us more in the past than we have beaten them, they having moved up either last year or this year like us.

But we played some awesome softball with solid defense, great pitching and some timely hitting. In only one game were we ever down significantly (9-2) and we came back to win that in the last inning after having tied it up earlier in the game.

While I played middle infield and first base on Saturday, I played exclusively at third on Sunday due to personnel. In the semi-final game, I actually made a key play that could have swung momentum towards the other team. With a runner on first, their batter (who was also their pitcher) laced a ball to the game in left center. Our center fielder hit our shortstop with his throw and he threw the ball high to me in an attempt to get the guy going first to third. I grabbed the throw and fired the ball to second to get the batter who was trying to move up a base. The throw that I made though was right on the money so the second baseman literally didn't have to move his glove as the batter slid right into it. Nice.

Offensively I was 13 out of 19 for a .684 average. The best part was that I was hitting the ball with much more authority and in the last game I was 4-4 and still had some hop in my legs. The training seems to be paying off!!

Anyway, we went 5-0 on the weekend, 3-0 today and won the tournament!




Here's the core of our team this weekend. The guy in the back row on the right is the only non-regular. Benny Baseball is right there in the middle in black, JC is on the far left standing up and our blind coach is kneeling, second from the right.






This picture includes three of the rookies who didn't get to play with us because we put them on another team to get them playing time. They'll play with us during the season though and go on trips and such.

The big trophy is what we won from our rival SC Softball. Anytime we play them in a tournament, the winner gets the trophy (which is a big bottle of vodka) until the next time we play. It's good fun. They were the team which had us down 9-2, but we came back to win.